John hid a creeping smile, draining the dregs of his ale, and Martha threw him a warning glance, snatching away his cup. The children had been sent to her bed, and when she crawled under the blanket, fitting her body carefully between their huddled shapes, she was surprised to see that Will was still awake. His eyes turned in the direction of the wall where the rhythmic sounds of the creaking bed ropes that supported his mother’s bed drifted through the thin walls, and he began to cry. She shushed him and, placing her hands over his ears, pulled him tight to her own body until she felt him go lax and heavy in her arms.

In the morning, it was clear to Martha that the bed ropes weren’t the only things squeaking during the night. Prompted by Patience, who dug a sharp elbow into his side, Daniel cleared his throat and announced that a Reverend Hastings, newly appointed minister of Billerica, would be coming to dinner within a few days. He droned on at length about the minister’s qualities of piety and of his recently acquired status as widower. Martha had been wiping the bowls clean and felt pulled into the sudden cessation of talk as a clod of dirt into a tunnel of wind. Seeing the expectant looks of her cousin turned in her direction, she realized Daniel had been speaking of the reverend for her benefit.

Casually, he rattled on about the trading he had recently done with the minister, the frugal nature of his habits, the austerity of his bearing, the dignity of his house. Martha brooded on whether the Reverend Hastings would be like the reverend from her childhood; the man who, despite her best efforts, entered her thoughts at times like a clot in sour milk. If so, Reverend Hastings would have no apparent vices of his own to make him humble or soft in his opinions of others who had sinned. He would be dry and sharp and, worst of all, full of purpose. He would carry within the folds of his cloak the breath of winter and peer at everyone with pale robin’s-egg eyes, uncovering and revealing every speck of unlawfulness in moral conduct, and his hands would make a punishment of every caress.

Signaling to John to begin the morning’s work, Thomas stood up and walked out the door, shading his eyes briefly in her direction, as though he had come upon her naked. She turned away, suddenly angry, snapping the cleaning rag aggressively across the boards of the table, spraying the floor with remnants of cornmeal. She said to no one in particular, “I’ll not be trussed up and bundled off to the first man, reverend though he may be, who comes sniffing around. By God, I’ll not.”

For the first time in days, persistent thoughts of hen feathers filled her mind. Ripping the apron off her waist, she threw it to the floor and fled from the house, keenly aware of the astonished looks traded between her cousin and Daniel.

She walked in circles around the yard until the pumping in her chest slowed. Daniel soon emerged from the house and, awkwardly gesturing an apologetic hand to her, began to hoe weeds in the garden. He threw himself into the work as though he would, in a single day, make up for all the time gone, and Martha thought she had never seen a man flail himself so at a task. Every limb was at odds with every other, elbows flying, knees bobbing, face as red as autumn cranberries, until, she thought, he would wear himself into the very soil. She looked at him critically for a while and then turned towards the barn, her arms crossed, regarding the shadow of Thomas passing back and forth through layered columns of sunlight from the open hayloft above.

In the barn she found Thomas running his hand over the flanks of one of the milk cows. The cow had been bawling fitfully for days, moving back and forth in a disquieting motion as it shifted its weight from one front hoof to the other. Thomas didn’t turn at her approach, but she knew he was aware of her presence. To make conversation she thought to ask him if the beast had stones in the belly, even though she knew it was a blocked hind stomach. Thomas had once remarked in passing to John that if a Welshman knew nothing else at all, he would know about sheep and cows and, for all their great size, the delicacy of their inner workings. She moved to cradle the cow’s neck in her arms, scratching at its cross-grained hide with her nails. It lifted its head, thick upper lip twitching, and Martha breathed in the smell of sour grasses fermenting in the maw behind the animal’s grinding teeth and knew from this that it was not fatally sick. Thomas knelt down, pressing his hands gently into the cow’s underside, shielding his face from Martha with the brim of his hat.

She sat down next to him and played with the straw between her fingers before asking, “What’s a Swedish feather?”

He turned to her, startled, with raised brows, as though she had asked him to jump off a cliff.

“John says I have a tongue like a Swedish feather.” She had asked the question in all earnestness, but when he moved to hide a smile, she bridled.

He straightened his mouth and answered, “It’s a weapon. A short pike with a steel-pointed blade. I say so as I have had necessity to use one.”

“And where,” she asked stiffly, “would you have had use for such a one as those?”

“Most times, missus,” he said, standing, “between the eyes and the belly.” He walked to another stall but soon returned with a flannel cloth and a bottle of oil. He uptilted the bottle onto the rag and commenced gently rubbing the cow’s hide, darkening it into circled, glistening patches. “I’ve been a soldier.” He looked at her significantly. “And I believe you know on which side I fought.” He set the bottle down, balancing it into the straw, and began carefully pressing his fingers into the cow’s soft underbelly, expertly probing the length of the entrails through the tightened, distended skin. “I were a pikeman, so I had use for such as a Swedish feather.”

“And did you live in London, as Will says?” she asked, and she was all too aware that her mouth had fallen slightly open, like a girl who is starving, fed with a very small spoon. She had once heard her sister’s husband, Roger, say that there was no greater place than London, or more wicked, as men walked with less reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an alehouse.

“Aye, I lived in that place. I left Wales, suddenlike, and by sixteen I were a man-at-arms.” He nodded for her to hand him the bottle again and he oiled both hands, rubbing them briskly together, warming them. She watched his splayed fingers moving knowledgeably over the cow’s hide, and when it bawled again in pain, he called to it chidingly, “Bod dawelu,” as though to a child protesting overmuch to a dose of physic. “You may reckon London a palace with streets of pearl and ivory, but they had cows and sheep there as well, the kind that stand on their two back legs. I lived in that cesspool until the war, called by my own conscience to fight.” He moved to help her from the straw and draped one long arm over the cow’s back. He looked at her evenly before saying, “And now I’ve told you enough to bring me trouble.”

She ducked her head, feeling his gaze raking the top of her skull. “Why do you tell me this?” she asked defensively.

“Because… I believe you know what it’s like to carry the weight of something hidden that can’t be spoken of. Not to friend, nor ken, nor to the closest partner of your bosom.”

As he spoke, she had placed her own mirroring hand across the beast, making an unlinked arc of both their arms. She couldn’t look at his face, unnerved that he would know she had secrets to keep; instead, she intently studied the knotted joints of his hands and the calluses that shielded the pads of his fingers. She willed herself to think of the wooden trunk set next to his bed, and the red coat Will had told her was nestled within. There came to her then the stories that her father had told her of the long and bloody civil war in the old England thirty years ago; of the red coats of Cromwell’s New Model Army, an army that was, in its day, one of the best and most disciplined to fight in the known world.

She met his eyes and asked, “What could I possibly have to hide? I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never seen anything.” A note of bitterness had crept into her voice and she tamped it down lest he think her shrewish. His hand, still coated in a fine membrane of oil, crept over her own, the calluses rasping and unyielding across her skin; but there was no proprietary feel to the touch, and he didn’t move his body closer to hers as a preamble to some coarser action, and there were no whispered words as a ploy to reach and grab.

“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.

There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”

She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”